


Local Boy Makes Good

by dorothy_notgale



Category: Bride of Re-Animator (1989), Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator (1985)
Genre: Ambiguity, Backstory, References to Abuse, References to Drugs, Religious Upbringing, TAGS TO BE UPDATED FOR LATER CHAPTERS
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:47:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Such an intelligent, driven young man. He wants so much to help others. Where did he come from? Who were his people? He must be making them proud, wherever they are.</p>
<p>Or, birth is always painful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Local Boy Makes Good

**Author's Note:**

> This Prologue is pretty much exclusively my headcanon re: one character's backstory. Later chapters to take place during canon.

Ezekiel H., the only surviving son of the late great Preacher Billy West and his devoted wife, Cora, was always a quiet boy, delicate and studious. With the family's lifestyle, his bookishness might've been the only thing kept him in school past fourteen.

Little Zeke was raised out of campers and boxes and the occasional trip back to the family homestead, heir as he was to the last of the old-fashioned revivalists. They spent months out of every year on the road, and Billy always said doing the Lord's work paid a fair wage. Judging by the collection plates they hauled in after each time a dyin' lady walked, it was more than fair.

They did it all—guest sermons, motivational speaking, child preaching, faith healing, even a little snake handling in the more out-of-the-way towns. Zeke was the one tasked with feeding rats to the rattlers; when he was twelve, he devised an almost foolproof technique for removing the snakes' venom sacs. It worked, except for that one incident, after which the family switched to speaking in tongues. _Y'ai'Ng'Ngah Yog-Sothoth H'ee-L'_ _G_ _eb F'ai Throdog Uaaah_. (Everybody makes the occasional mistake. Zeke's black eye was almost as swollen as Billy's hand.)

Standing to the side of the action, he was always calm, polite, looking underfed and dour in his neatly pressed uniform of short-sleeved shirt, black slacks, and narrow tie—the diametric opposite of his flamboyant father's scarlet coats and cowboy boots. That's not to say Zeke had nothing in common with the man who sired him; his father's stamp was all over the youth in the form of fervor, passion, and an odd sickly charisma which could ensnare unwary listeners into faith, not in God, but in his visions. Teachers, in private, said he could really make something of himself if not for the expectation that his daddy'd groom him to take over the business.

It was such a shame what happened his last year of high school. To hear folks in town tell it, he'd received a college acceptance letter in the mail just that morning. When he arrived home to tell his parents the news, he was met by the Sheriff's deputies. Car crash; Billy had been driving on a cocktail of whiskey and painkillers.

(Later it came out that the painkillers had been prescribed for lingering pain following the rattler problem three years ago. Old Billy's hittin' arm never had recovered from the venom, though luckily he was an ambidextrous drinker.)

Cora passed while her son was still en route. He didn't have her embalmed, but requested, pale-faced and dry-eyed, that the morgue keep her on ice for a little while—just until they knew whether it was to be a double burial.

Nobody was surprised when Zeke sat by his father's bedside and prayed in furious silence for three days straight until he fainted and had to be admitted himself. In the early hours of the fourth morning—the boy's eighteenth birthday, in fact—Billy's regular heart meds were somehow missed. He suffered a final cardiac arrest while his son's chart said he lay slumbering at the other end of the hospital.

Everyone was surprised, though, when the boy took his inheritance, sold off all of the non-liquid assets, and left town for Massachusetts the week after the funeral. (The insurance and malpractice settlements followed later.)

Folks say he went to Europe; they say he studied science. They say he doctored soldiers in Peru. They say he never married and that he threw his family Bible out the window of the bus leaving town.

They say his mother's ghost began wandering the local cemetery a few years later, when someone desecrated her grave. Nobody would've had the heart to tell Zeke, or Herbert as he apparently called himself by then, even if they had known of a forwarding address.

 


End file.
